In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash!

Who Do You Trust?

An Essay on The Transformation of Trust in a Multivariate Universe

Trust is a cudgel. It's not meant to be, or at least it isn't defined as such. But in a world of hidden agendas, hierarchies, and group-think, "trust" has become a keyword for submission, subservience, and general me-too-ism. Here's how it works in this non-trusting world:

I say to you, "Can I trust you?" This is a signal requiring agreement and not a request for a thoughtful answer. In fact, the slightest hesitation to blurt back "yes," is an obvious "no." This is why there are contracts, which become a written form of trust; a very explicit, truth-or-consequences form. Without this sort of explicitness, trust can't be a yes or no question, so don't ask! 

Losing the Mutuality of Trust

Trust between two people requires a history of shared experiences. It requires mutuality and time. Furthermore, blanket trust isn't possible and probably not particularly useful except in the closest relationships. Especially in a business relationship, trust needs to have limitations and for good reasons. Let's start with the basics.

I'm generally a trusting person, which means that without any reason to think otherwise, I believe in the goodness of human nature, what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called our innate or uncorrupted morals. It's obviously a debatable point that has raised deep philosophical questions over the ages, but for the sake of simplistic argument, I want to like people and not think ill of them. People who are prone to paranoia come at life from the opposite side of generally distrusting people, a more Hobbesian state of brutishness and misery. If we limit this dichotomy of feelings to business behavior, things start to get confused. Instead of a linear axis with naive faith at one end and anti-social withdrawal at the other, we find people who are able to alternate between trust and paranoia as if personae can be turned on and off like the altered states of quantum mechanics. We'll call this manipulative trust, our cudgel, our bludgeon, our truncheon.

Reversing the Polarity of Trust

I'll extend this metaphor to account for manipulative trust and calculate degrees of behavioral effects, which I know is murky, but bear with me. In a purely reactive world, our trust-paranoia axis can be seen as a measure of mood, where each of us has some resting state along the axis and given a stimulus in one direction or the other, our change in mood can be measured like the arc of a thrown object. The object accelerates, reaches peak velocity, and then eventually returns to the resting state. It's a basic potential vs. kinetic energy formula and it's obviously overly simplistic, but it gives my metaphorical argument a base line.

Let's say I'm working on a project with a group of people. These are people I've worked with before, which means that there's some mutuality and trust between and among us. This hypothetical project is like an accelerating object, and if all goes well, we not only achieve a peak velocity, but we're even able to defy gravity and achieve a sort of escape velocity that launches this project into the altered state known as completion. This trust is focused on work (energy), and the synergy this creates magnifies our individual efforts to create a whole larger than the sum of its parts. One could call this the teamwork effect, but since the idea of teams implies an all-powerful captain, I prefer to think of this ideal state as a kind of  natural cooperation.

But since the world is a messy place, even for physics experiments, the ideal state doesn't necessarily resemble the state of the real world. In other words, stuff happens; and this is the unpredictable quantum nature of life. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, human nature doesn't exist in a void or even a two-dimensional space. Instead, individual lives are played out on the axis of time, and our progress along this axis is subject to the constant bombardment of external stimuli affecting our senses and or sensitivities.

Within this complex interaction of forces, energies, and emotions exist many subsets of the "real world." Universities, in their ivory-towered glory, are an obvious example of an idealized subset of the larger world. In my professional persona, I inhabit a more rough-beast-like subset known as the business world. Somehow, these subsets provide an excuse to change the rules of everyday life. In other words, human nature takes on a different energy state when passing from one real-world subset to another, and this is how something as basic as trust can be transformed from a state of mutuality into a blunt object.  

Trusting Doublespeak in an Orwellian World

Most generally, business institutions rely on hierarchical organizations to assign responsibility along a chain of command. Ultimate responsibility rests at the top of the org chart, with various divisions of responsibility delegated and spread out into multiple channels beneath. At each layer in this hierarchy, the superior node "trusts" the inferior nodes to fulfill some assigned portion of the larger responsibility. In this hierarchical arrangement, trust loses the idealistic sense of mutuality and is turned into a blunt instrument of subjugation. By the very nature of the org chart, trust becomes a one-way street. The superior node dictates the terms of trust in a process known as the delegation of responsibilities. The inferior nodes are entrusted to deliver, and failure to do so is viewed as a breach of trust. Thus standard business practice alters the nature of trust, turning into a uni-directional force, which is contrary to the very definition of trust!

Where trust in the larger world is built upon interpersonal relationships, trust in the business world is imposed by the nature of hierarchy. From a practical point of view, this allows trust to be used as a productivity tool, as a systematic means for maintaining orderly business processes, and even as a mechanism for team-building (a favorite business metaphor for uniformity). But using trust in these ways is ultimately manipulative and often amounts to a kind of tough love, aka character building, that many find appealing in a macho sort of way. 

If George Orwell can create a world where Love is Hate, then why not a world where trust is built on mistrust? We could even call this top-down trust, lacking any sort of mutuality.

Who Do you Trust?

I have observed the phenomenon of top-down trust used to manipulate business outcomes in much the same way parents will use guilt to manipulate children. But it's only recently that I've come to understand the general lack of two-way trust and the pervasiveness of paranoia in acceptable business behavior. This makes better sense when you consider the nature of competition and natural selection; survival of the fittest. 

Unfortunately for me, not only am I a trusting sort, but I'm not particularly competitive in most things. These two traits seem to go together and probably account in large measure for my lack of natural business acumen. It doesn't mean that I'm unable to succeed, just that my way of doing things looks wrong and downright misguided to many of the people I've worked with in the business subset of the universe. 

I don't think I can change who I am quite enough to become a conforming individual in the corporate organization. But I do try to understand this somewhat foreign world I've been inhabiting for so long. It's difficult to manage this feat in a non-judgemental way, and yet I do intend to continue to build upon my successes in this world. Do I trust myself with this task? Yes, but only as long as I learn how to trust those around me!

ePublishing for fun and profit with WalrusInk

We love publishing
The WalrusInk partners are all experienced publishing professionals. Not only is it an industry we know well, it's something we love doing. For us, ePublishing is an opportunity to do what we love without the heavyweight burdens of old-fashioned publishing we feel are crushing the industry into oblivion.

We love technology
As much as we love publishing, we are also passionate about technology. ePublishing involves rapidly changing technologies that are ushering in a genuinely new age of publishing. While the publishing status quo sees these changes as a threat, we recognize them as a remarkably exciting opportunity with unbounded potential.

We love paradigm shifts
We see ePublishing as providing a fundamental shift in the way knowledge is shared, which is a pretty big deal and something we'll likely write about at greater length in the future, but for now, you'll just have to take our word for it.

We love authors
And finally, we love working with authors. We learn so much from our authors and it makes us proud to be able to help hone, clarify, and ultimately publish their work and make it available to buyers, the seekers of knowledge, our loyal customers.

WalrusInk: friend of authors, foe of tyranny!

Pricing eBooks—Logical Assumptions Need Not Apply

There's really no consistent logic to how eBooks are currently priced. Publishers want prices higher to increase profit margins. Amazon wants prices lower to encourage increased sales volume. Apple wants prices more standardized, because that's just the way Apple does things. There have been reports of eBook editions selling for higher prices than printed editions, which makes little sense except that some publisher has decided that they can make more money this way. There have been reports of Amazon capitulating to publishers' demands to raise eBook prices, followed by reports several months later of Amazon forcing publishers to sell their eBooks at lower prices.

There's not much clarity to be gained by watching the big boys try to bully and bludgeon each other over pricing. WalrusInk pricing will attempt to establish a price that is fair to consumers and provides a reasonable profit to our partnership of editors and authors so that we can earn a reasonable living. We have attempted to model this with some assumptions about volume and velocity, but there's very little history on which to base our assumptions. One ends up with a set of variables that is larger than the set of constants, which is akin to looking at the stars to predict the future only to find that there are ever more stars and no predictable future.

Nonetheless, the eager-beaver budgeteers at WalrusInk have decided to base our model on a standard eBook price of $9.99. We could build a numerical model to justify this decision, but in the end, it seems like a fair and reasonable price from just about every point of view. It's easy to imagine that some of our shorter eBooks will sell for less, but we're more likely to want to split a book into two parts than go for a single book at a higher price. Why? That's a discussion for a future blog.

The End of Words, or South-Bound Dictionaries

I wrote this last year, Thanksgiving 2009, though why I never posted it is unclear: sloth, forgetfulness, doubt, the usual excuses of an unfocused mind. But I find my work in this case to be of a timeless nature, so I'm publishing it now.

Twas the day after Thanksgiving, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except in the living room. The stockings were hung by the fireplace with care, in hopes that they'd dry out, because it was raining.
We are all reading: Katharine is halfway through Wolf Hall, a 700-page fictionalized account of Henry VIII that recently won the Man Booker Prize. Marian has a script from her friend, Edward Albee, and she's busily underlining with a yellow marker. Wells has left the room to tend to the roasting sweet potatoes and spend some quality time with his chemistry textbook.

I am browsing, rather than actually reading, through the Apple iTunes store for anything having to do with Portugal in general or Lisbon specifically. There are travel apps for guide books, maps, and language study; audiobooks, a walking tour of Lisbon and a recently published book about the great earthquake, tidal wave, and fire of 1755 that is referred to by Voltaire in Candide; and there are lectures from iTunes U. that touch on matters Portuguese from numerous angles, including matters economic and political.

But it is Katharine who brings up the subject of zymurgy—actually, the discussion is focussed on the word rather than the subject. There it is, right in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of the page, in the middle of a chapter, in the middle of Wolf Hall. I've looked it up, now.

zy·mur·gy (zī'mûr'jē)
n. The branch of chemistry that deals with fermentation processes, as in brewing.

So says the American Heritage Dictionary, and Katharine remarks that it is just like the word "enzyme." She can make these rapid word associations because she's studied both Greek and Latin, though only Greek matters in this case. But then follows this gem of randomness; a fact so trivial and yet so profound, that I barely know what to say, except that I shall treasure this bit of knowledge and use it in conversation as often as possible.

The following I quote in it's entirety from dictionary.com by way of the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Word Origin & History

zymurgy
branch of chemistry which deals with wine-making and brewing, 1868, from Gk. zymo-, comb. form of zyme "a leaven" (from PIE base *yus-; see juice) + -ourgia "a working," from ergon "work" (see urge (v.)). The last word in many standard English dictionaries; but in the OED [2nd ed.] the last word is zyxt, an obsolete Kentish form of the second person singular of see (v.).

The Transition Manifesto: Revolution or exaggerated idealism?

I have written a Manifesto for WalrusInk. It's several paragraphs long, but in essence, it boils down to:

WalrusInk: ePublishing friend of authors and foe of tyranny!

We don't talk seriously about manifestos and tyranny these days, but I'm attracted to the revolutionary fervor of these words. And then I was talking on the phone with my friend, Kenny, and he started talking about one of his former students who wrote a masters thesis about Transition Magazine and Marcel Duchamp. I had never heard of Transition Magazine, so while we were talking, I looked it up in Wikipedia, which is where I live a good deal of my online time.

"Transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris."

I had discovered an example of 20's radical idealism that somehow wasn't included in my studies of utopian architecture and planning from the period. This was pure art for art's sake as a means to save the world. None of the semi-concrete "machine for living" or "contemporary city" idealism of Le Corbusier and his followers. But either way, weather you build it of words or wood, there's something quaint and naive about 20s idealism, especially in light of history, which pretty much goose-stepped all of that creative energy, turning it into hatred, war, and oblivion; a bitter irony.

What makes Transition apropos to WalrusInk, is their manifesto, which is a model of revolutionary fervor and chest-beating; an attempt to cast off what they saw as literary handcuffs in favor of a new world order created in words. Back to Wikipedia:

"The journal gained notoriety in 1929 when Jolas issued a manifesto about writing. He personally asked writers to sign "The Revolution of the Word Proclamation" which appeared in issue 16/17 of transition. It began:

"Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint... Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality" and that "The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries."

WalrusInk is not nearly so militant about disowning our literary heritage. In fact, we're very aware of celebrating the past while accepting change and looking forward to all that technology promises. But we do find ourselves ready to cast off much of what has come before us in the publishing world. In a way, we see an ePublishing revolution as the savior of publishing, which has become shackled to old business models based on 19th century manufacturing, distribution, and accounting. We even believe that by trying to squeeze every penny of profit out of this untenable model, publishing has given up any sort of gravitas or moral center that used to account for much of what was exciting and worthy in publishing.

Like Transition, we welcome new ways of approaching old problems and see this as a timely and necessary part of the general dissemination of knowledge. What gives this the flavor of a revolution is the resistance of the status quo to change, which explains why WalrusInk has chosen to go outside of the status quo to adopt the new models made possible by electronic publishing, pervasive computing, and a lot of forward-thinking writers.

Viva la WalrusInk manifesto! Sic Semper Tyrannus, and viva la revolution!